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I wonder how many religious people take their creation myths as 'absolute truth.' Sure, there's the odd Young Earth Creationist around, but I have to imagine th

I wonder how many religious people take their creation myths as 'absolute truth.' Sure, there's the odd Young Earth Creationist around, but I have to imagine that the average Christian doesn't think that Genesis is meant as literal truth (Catholics, for example, acknowledge the science of evolution). Same goes for most religions, I'd think.

Quekid5 5y ago
It's definitely an interesting question, but a minor nit about your comment: evolution is not really about the origin of the universe, just the origin of species. So it feels a bit out of place to state that Catholics have no problem with evolution since evolution and Genesis are a bit orthogonal. Obviously, there are bits of the Genesis story that could be considered counter to what evolution shows -- if taken literally -- but... Maybe I'm being a bit too pedantic.
- agentwiggles 5y ago
  Nah, that's fair criticism, but my point is really just that at least some large subset of Christians doctrinally accept a scientific explanation for the origin of species. My instinct is that many of those Christians wouldn't have that much trouble reconciling the Big Bang theory with their religion.
  - Quekid5 5y ago
    Oh, for sure.
Gualdrapo 5y ago
Now that you mention it, someone at Reddit just asked a few minutes ago if the Big Bang is the 'answer' to the creation of the universe, and one of the replies was > No. That is just so called scientists guessing. Everyone knows existence was created 4000 years ago by God. Anyone that tells you otherwise is delusional.[0] [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/u85guq/comment/i5izams/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/u85guq/c...
- outworlder 5y ago
  It's interesting how they never question anything past that. That answer just kicks the can down the road. Sure, let's assume it's true. Where did God come from?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - lucidone 5y ago
    That's similar to asking where infinity starts and ends. I like Spinoza's bit about a self-causing cause for this.
    - typeofhuman 5y ago
      (function () { new Infinity().start() }());
  - prmph 5y ago
    Well, where did the universe come from? Where did time come from? When did it begin? There are certain things the answers to which goes beyond the bounds of the naive logic we are familiar with. The Bible says that God has no beginning (or end), he exists outside the bounds of time. Though it is hard to wrap our heads around that concept, there is no reason to think it is not possible, considering the rhetorical questions above.
    - nicoburns 5y ago
      One thing I've noticed is that there is huge spectrum of beliefs about what God is: On the one end God is just some kind of vague abstract energy that acts akin to some force fate and ends up not being that different to an agnostic or scientific viewpoint of the world. On the other end you get a highly personified God that thinks in a human-like way with highly specific wants and desires who acts as a moral authority in addition to being a creator (although the rationale behind them being a moral authority never seems to be explained) I think God as a metaphor for the unknown needs little justification (as you say nobody really has a better explanation). But God as a human-like moral authority doesn't in any way follow from that, and there is lots of reason to think that there is no such God.
prmph 5y ago
Well, Genesis does not claim the earth is young. It says the earth existed for an unknown period of time, before God began to prepare it for habitation. The period of this preparation is also not given (it could be arbitrarily long). Genesis also gives an order of appearance of life (plants -> animals -> man) that roughly agrees with the fossil record. There is nothing in Genesis that is at variance with known science, and nothing in it that actually supports a young earth.
- elwell 5y ago
  As a Christian and a believer that evolution is a beautiful thing, the Genesis story increases my faith; even just the idea of whether or not there was a finite Beginning, seems easy for a religion-crafter to get wrong.
  - dane-pgp 5y ago
    > seems easy for a religion-crafter to get wrong. Yes, it turns out it's also an idea that philosophy-crafters and science-crafters can also get wrong: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steady-state_model#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steady-state_model#History
  - gridspy 5y ago
    As a semi-christian, I agree. I think that evolution is the sort of beautiful self-correcting system that God would want to put in place.
- goto11 5y ago
  > There is nothing in Genesis that is at variance with known science This is so absurd a claim I don't know where to begin. But how about the claim that the sky is a vault which separate the waters above from the waters below? The sky is not actually a vault with water above it, at least according to science. Or how about the claim that the sun and moon and stars was created after plants and trees were created?
  - prmph 5y ago
joe_the_user 5y ago
Scientists present the Big Bang as the best picture of the process of the start of our known universe according to the data and theories so far derived - a not-completely certain process ongoing discovery. Even if the average religious worshiper might be skeptical or view things metaphorically, religions don't present their creation myths as anything like a process of ongoing discovery.
- marginalia_nu 5y ago
  To be fair, a fairly basic premise in Christianity is that the truth is unknowable, we as humans are too limited to grasp it, and it is only through divine revelation we may have access to the truth. You really shouldn't be finding people claiming to have all the truths about God's acts, plans, and nature -- at least that's a sign they haven't quite grasped fairly central themes in the faith. Interestingly, there's an extensive tradition of negative theology, that is the study of what we can't know about God. This isn't exclusively a Christian thing, but seems to be the result of the Skeptic tradition of Hellenic philosophy coming into contact with the Abrahamic faiths. John Scotus wrote that "God is not, because he transcends being". Something to think about.
pishpash 5y ago
Depends on how you average. How religious do you need to be to be considered among "religious people"?
bastardoperator 5y ago
Religion is all about discarding pieces of data that you don't like while fixating on the pieces you find meaningful. Some people believe the planet is flat, if people can believe that I assume people can at this point believe anything.
huntertwo 5y ago
Something like a third of Americans are young earth creationists.
sweettea 5y ago
Not all Catholics: the Kolbe Center for the Study of Creation (kolbecenter.org) attempts to convince others that Catholics ought believe in young earth creationism. (To be precise, they advocate that the church never said one could believe in evolution, rather that evolution could be studied to try to reconcile against traditional understandings of creation, which many took as license to believe in evolution). Even the average Catholic is required to believe that all humans are descended from a literal first man (Humani Generis, p. 37). I would posit that someone believing in YEC is strongly correlated to their willingness to accept and embrace other unpopular and/or hard tenets of their religion. There are, for instance, plenty of Catholics who believe in evolution, but most of those do not go beyond what Catholicism requires in the way of fasting or sexuality. Thus raising the question 'what makes someone a religious person?'...
- ncmncm 5y ago
  Their insight is that you can get all the benefits of believing in evolution just by acting as if you believe it, without believing it. And the same applies to all facts. Scientists, of course, all rely on the same insight, and don't believe anything except experiments; plus God, if they care to.

Quekid5 5y ago

It's definitely an interesting question, but a minor nit about your comment: evolution is not really about the origin of the universe, just the origin of species. So it feels a bit out of place to state that Catholics have no problem with evolution since evolution and Genesis are a bit orthogonal. Obviously, there are bits of the Genesis story that could be considered counter to what evolution shows -- if taken literally -- but... Maybe I'm being a bit too pedantic.

agentwiggles 5y ago
Nah, that's fair criticism, but my point is really just that at least some large subset of Christians doctrinally accept a scientific explanation for the origin of species. My instinct is that many of those Christians wouldn't have that much trouble reconciling the Big Bang theory with their religion.
- Quekid5 5y ago
  Oh, for sure.

Gualdrapo 5y ago

Now that you mention it, someone at Reddit just asked a few minutes ago if the Big Bang is the 'answer' to the creation of the universe, and one of the replies was > No. That is just so called scientists guessing. Everyone knows existence was created 4000 years ago by God. Anyone that tells you otherwise is delusional.[0] [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/u85guq/comment/i5izams/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/u85guq/c...

outworlder 5y ago
It's interesting how they never question anything past that. That answer just kicks the can down the road. Sure, let's assume it's true. Where did God come from?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- lucidone 5y ago
  That's similar to asking where infinity starts and ends. I like Spinoza's bit about a self-causing cause for this.
  - typeofhuman 5y ago
    (function () { new Infinity().start() }());
- prmph 5y ago
  Well, where did the universe come from? Where did time come from? When did it begin? There are certain things the answers to which goes beyond the bounds of the naive logic we are familiar with. The Bible says that God has no beginning (or end), he exists outside the bounds of time. Though it is hard to wrap our heads around that concept, there is no reason to think it is not possible, considering the rhetorical questions above.
  - nicoburns 5y ago
    One thing I've noticed is that there is huge spectrum of beliefs about what God is: On the one end God is just some kind of vague abstract energy that acts akin to some force fate and ends up not being that different to an agnostic or scientific viewpoint of the world. On the other end you get a highly personified God that thinks in a human-like way with highly specific wants and desires who acts as a moral authority in addition to being a creator (although the rationale behind them being a moral authority never seems to be explained) I think God as a metaphor for the unknown needs little justification (as you say nobody really has a better explanation). But God as a human-like moral authority doesn't in any way follow from that, and there is lots of reason to think that there is no such God.

prmph 5y ago

Well, Genesis does not claim the earth is young. It says the earth existed for an unknown period of time, before God began to prepare it for habitation. The period of this preparation is also not given (it could be arbitrarily long). Genesis also gives an order of appearance of life (plants -> animals -> man) that roughly agrees with the fossil record. There is nothing in Genesis that is at variance with known science, and nothing in it that actually supports a young earth.

elwell 5y ago
As a Christian and a believer that evolution is a beautiful thing, the Genesis story increases my faith; even just the idea of whether or not there was a finite Beginning, seems easy for a religion-crafter to get wrong.
- dane-pgp 5y ago
  > seems easy for a religion-crafter to get wrong. Yes, it turns out it's also an idea that philosophy-crafters and science-crafters can also get wrong: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steady-state_model#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steady-state_model#History
- gridspy 5y ago
  As a semi-christian, I agree. I think that evolution is the sort of beautiful self-correcting system that God would want to put in place.
goto11 5y ago
> There is nothing in Genesis that is at variance with known science This is so absurd a claim I don't know where to begin. But how about the claim that the sky is a vault which separate the waters above from the waters below? The sky is not actually a vault with water above it, at least according to science. Or how about the claim that the sun and moon and stars was created after plants and trees were created?
- prmph 5y ago

joe_the_user 5y ago

Scientists present the Big Bang as the best picture of the process of the start of our known universe according to the data and theories so far derived - a not-completely certain process ongoing discovery. Even if the average religious worshiper might be skeptical or view things metaphorically, religions don't present their creation myths as anything like a process of ongoing discovery.

marginalia_nu 5y ago
To be fair, a fairly basic premise in Christianity is that the truth is unknowable, we as humans are too limited to grasp it, and it is only through divine revelation we may have access to the truth. You really shouldn't be finding people claiming to have all the truths about God's acts, plans, and nature -- at least that's a sign they haven't quite grasped fairly central themes in the faith. Interestingly, there's an extensive tradition of negative theology, that is the study of what we can't know about God. This isn't exclusively a Christian thing, but seems to be the result of the Skeptic tradition of Hellenic philosophy coming into contact with the Abrahamic faiths. John Scotus wrote that "God is not, because he transcends being". Something to think about.

pishpash 5y ago

Depends on how you average. How religious do you need to be to be considered among "religious people"?

bastardoperator 5y ago

Religion is all about discarding pieces of data that you don't like while fixating on the pieces you find meaningful. Some people believe the planet is flat, if people can believe that I assume people can at this point believe anything.

huntertwo 5y ago

Something like a third of Americans are young earth creationists.

sweettea 5y ago

Not all Catholics: the Kolbe Center for the Study of Creation (kolbecenter.org) attempts to convince others that Catholics ought believe in young earth creationism. (To be precise, they advocate that the church never said one could believe in evolution, rather that evolution could be studied to try to reconcile against traditional understandings of creation, which many took as license to believe in evolution). Even the average Catholic is required to believe that all humans are descended from a literal first man (Humani Generis, p. 37). I would posit that someone believing in YEC is strongly correlated to their willingness to accept and embrace other unpopular and/or hard tenets of their religion. There are, for instance, plenty of Catholics who believe in evolution, but most of those do not go beyond what Catholicism requires in the way of fasting or sexuality. Thus raising the question 'what makes someone a religious person?'...

ncmncm 5y ago
Their insight is that you can get all the benefits of believing in evolution just by acting as if you believe it, without believing it. And the same applies to all facts. Scientists, of course, all rely on the same insight, and don't believe anything except experiments; plus God, if they care to.